Covid-19 created cascades of shortages, disruptions, and problems that rolled downhill and landed in the most vulnerable neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods, it's often nonprofit organizations that provide services to members of the community. While the pandemic accelerated the need for digital transformation throughout the economy, the nonprofit sector was not immune to the need for nearly overnight innovation. As experts on the use of technology for social good, we've observed the many ways that nonprofits have been adopting "smart tech" to further social change in the wake of the pandemic, which we chronicle in our upcoming book, The Smart Nonprofit. We use "smart tech" as an umbrella term for advanced digital technologies that make decisions for people.

I came into the kitchen recently to find my husband cradling our electricity smart meter with the kind of tender attention more usually directed to a new-born, his phone clutched in his free hand. "You didn't turn your office heater off last night," he said. I went in this morning to turn it on again!" "Last night we used 10…" (here he added a unit, presumably of electricity, but all that stuff is Martian to me. "It shouldn't be that high." "But I turned it off!" But our smart home had spoken and it is far more reliable than me, his life partner of 26 years. Our house now has app-enabled devices to control the heating and the boiler remotely, to check temperature, CO2 and noise levels and to see who is at the door. There are motion-detector cameras in the garden that send us videos of foxes threatening my hens, or his tortoises escaping. Since we installed a few solar panels, my husband's smart-home management has become more urgent and more granular. An app tells him how much we are consuming, but also how much we are producing, in real time. Now he bursts in when it's sunny, shouting "We're giving electricity to the grid!

Over the next decade, homes will become greener and smarter, with wardrobes folding clothes, toilets checking waste, and a space for video calls, a futurologist has claimed. Tom Cheesewright claims that trends were already pointing towards a more remote, flexible and sustainable life, but the pandemic and lockdown are making it happen faster. Research funded by Hive found that 88 per cent of people wanted to live in a more sustainable future but 41 per cent didn't know how to go about making it happen. There is also a push towards smart homes, with smart assistants, video doorbells and smart lights becoming more popular as people spent time indoors over lockdown. Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Mr Cheesewright said: 'The pressure of the pandemic brought that forward,' adding that homes are going to change to reflect these trends over the next decade. These changes will include a rise in'smart technology', including things like smart wardrobes that can iron and fold your clothes, or a medical toilet that can analyse your waste for signs of cancer or other health problems and report back to doctors, according to the futurologist.

These Amazon Echo speakers are on sale for a great discount. Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. When it comes to smart tech, certain items--an app-controlled lock, for instance--can seem impossibly complicated, especially for beginners. An easy way to become acquainted with these life-changing innovations is with a great smart speaker: They make it easy to listen to your favorite tunes, check the weather and more--all via voice control. Even better, right now, for Black Friday 2020, you can get not one, but two exceptional Amazon Echo smart speakers on sale for a sweet discount.

Personalised nutrition start-up myAir has unveiled its nutritional solution for better management of stress. The company developed a series of plant-based nutrition bars with a personalised edge. Each formulation contains a botanical blend designed to deliver a specific stress-relief effect. The herbal extract blends are based on profiling machine learning technology, and are customised to the consumer's stress profile and cognitive needs.

Architects are waking up to a new way of working where artificial intelligence (AI) deals with many of the mundane tasks involved in building design. The profession faces a profound shift that will lead to new opportunities and the need for new skills, experts say. In October 2019, for instance, the New York-based Chilean design guru Sebastián Errázuriz said on Instagram that 90 percent of the work that architects do today could change. "You should be taking measures right now," he said. At present, he said, it takes two to three years for an architect to complete a project, so gaining experience is a slow process.

Data centers are a focus of digital innovation. They can increase the pace of change by delivering information where and when it is needed, ensuring complete visibility and control over a distributed network. AI and machine learning are creating predictive data center operations, while edge computing is pushing data centers closer to end users. The rollout of 5G, coupled with edge computing, will accelerate the evolution of data centers to cope with next generation mobile networks. The roll out of 5G, coupled with edge computing, will accelerate the evolution of data centers to cope with next generation communications.

Imagine a world governed by smart technologies engineered to achieve three distinct yet interrelated normative ends: optimized transactional efficiency, resource productivity and human happiness. We could have congestion-free roads--no stop and go, no road rage! Instantaneous, personalized entertainment--no need to search or browse! Successful social interactions--no misunderstanding or missed cues! No surprise ailments, no failures, no missed opportunities!

With the launch of its Smart Energy subscription plan this year in Philadelphia, Inspire fulfilled a major part of its vision, explained CTO Mike Durst from the company's Center City office. "Our mission is all about creating this brighter energy future," he said. "A pillar of that is getting as many people as possible on clean energy." The subscription plan combines a seamless sign-up, flat supply price, cash rewards (when you use less energy than predicted) and energy-saving smart devices to outfit your home. Also, Inspire's Smart Home app allows you to control the devices and monitor your energy use, all from your smartphone.

How much surveillance is too much? That is a question being asked in China after police in the country began using sunglasses equipped with fixed facial recognition cameras in order to help identify potential suspects, reports said Wednesday. Since the beginning of China's Lunar New Year travel season, police at Zhengzhou East Railway Station have already identified and taken into custody seven fugitives in connection with major criminal cases. They also identified 26 people attempting to travel using other people's IDs, according to Chinese state media reports. The smart glasses are said to be connected to an internal database of suspects, which means police officers can quickly scan crowds while looking for fugitives.